Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Ralph Spoilsport writes "A coalition of 17 publishing companies has shut down library.nu and ifile.it, charging them with pirating ebooks. This comes less than a month after megaupload was shut down, and SOPA was stopped. If the busting of cyberlockers continues at this pace and online library sharing dismantled, this under-reported story may well be the tip of a very big iceberg — one quite beyond the P&L sheets of publishers and striking at basic human rights as outlined in the contradictions of the UN Charter. Is this a big deal — a grim coalition of corporate power? Or just mopping up some scurvy old pirates? Or somewhere in between?"
Adds new submitter roaryk, "According to the complaint, the sites offered users access to 400,000 e-books and made more than $11 million in revenue in the process. The admins, Fidel Nunez and Irina Ivanova, have been tracked down using their PayPal donation account, which was not anonymous. Despite the claims of the industry the site admins say they were barely able to cover the server costs with the revenue."

If you honestly believe what you are saying and/or are not a troll you need to get off the MegaMediaNewsSteam. I haven't heard anyone I know that still downloads their wares and were actually affected by MegaUpload going bunk. The best thing about the "pirates" is that they are extremely resourceful and have many, many different outlets to get their files. If you ask me, MegaUpload was probably the worst tool to use for this anyway. There are many more ways to get files and are just as effective. Hell, IRC was and still is better that MU.

Unless you have permission.
It's called freedom of speech. It's for expressing your opinions. It's for communicating your thoughts. It's not for sitting on your rear end and downloading some movie without paying for it. Calling downloading a "human right" is an insult to Martin Luther King, Peter Zenger, and everyone else who fought for our right to express ourselves.

MegaUpload and similar sites were used by general population, and outright made money from copyright theft. It was very similar to selling warez on streets, they just tried to hide it behind "clever" subscription models and affiliate programs. Yes, serious pirates will always be able to get their files, but when the circle is small enough companies don't care. They care about what most of population does, and they can easily make it harder and inconvenient enough for general population.

Think for a moment...if we appoint adjudicators of what content is and isn't free speech, we've already lost it.

Have you heard of the "courts?" They've been doing exactly that for hundreds of years. CP, for example, is not free speech. Saying a politician murdered a prostitute? Not free speech. Saying you think a politician's opinion is wrong and stupid and you would like to see him die? 100% protected free speech (yes, even the "want to see him die" part, so long as you don't encourage someone to kill him or say you are going to do it yourself).

Wasn't there a big shitstorm over *one* post being deleted a few years back? I think it was due to a court order or something of the like... maybe about the HDCP keys or something? Bah.

I think the fact that posts *cannot* be deleted makes people consider what they are going to post a little more carefully. Aside from the usual spam and idiocy, I generally find the commentary here to be of a higher quality in general than places like Reddit or the comments section in other news sites. I feel that this is going to go into the shitter now.

If you copy media you didn't purchase AND you make a profit off of it, you're a thief.

We do have to be careful that this doesn't turn into a slippery slope but, c'mon, making a profit off of other artists material which you don't have the rights to is just good old fashioned stealing no matter how you slice it.

There are very few cases of copyright theft: when media cartels deny an artist the right to use their own work, even if there is no contract between the artist and the cartel. The rest which you seem to be talking about is copyright infrigement.

Most of it? It's a temporary dip. The pro-culture-theft crowd was saying the same thing when Napster was shut down, I'm sure the idea of average Joes using something as technically complicated as torrents seemed at least as ridiculous back then as the idea of average Joes running their torrents over untraceable, unstoppable darknets seems now.

I really don't like copyright infringers. They give the rest of the internet users a bad name. I've downloaded share of illegal content but I've since stopped doing it for the exact reasons you point out. If I don't think something is worth the price the copyright owner is asking, I just simply don't watch/listen/read it. There's enough other media on the internet for free, or with price and terms that I do agree with that I don't need to pirate stuff if I feel it isn't worth the price. Sure I may not get to see all the new movies, but I really don't feel like I'm missing much.

Yep as someone that services and builds PCs 6 days a week I can tell you for home users the most popular is.....drumroll....plain old P2P. That's right, your fasttracks, your Gnucleus, although BT has gained some simply because of the high profile of TPB and the clients that are simple enough your grandma could use them. Next round i predict semi anon software that your grandma can run where they mix in some plausible deniability using encrypted cache stores just to make it extra painful for the *.A.As and may i say i hope it hurts.

Those bastards screw the artists, see meatloaf going bankrupt fighting the record companies for nearly 20 years because they had the brass balls to claim bat out of hell 1 never made a dime. Yeah the album that set a record for longest run on the top 200 never made a dime, and if you tickle my balls they play jingle bells. hell look at Cheap trick having to sue right now because the record company refuses to give them a cent of digital downloads because those didn't exist in the 70s therefor the record companies say tough shit. Pretty much ALL the major artists of the 70s aren't seeing a dime on iTunes, the record companies pocket every cent.

So until We, The People as well as the artists are given a seat at the bargaining table as a musician please rob these fuckers blind. Living a stone's throw from Memphis I've seen many a kid sign the record contracts with stars in their eyes only to get robbed blind by the record companies who take everything and use Hollywood accounting to give the kid a bill even if the album sells a million and they recorded it themselves. Honestly the fucking mob are more honest than those bastards and this whole thing is NOT about piracy, its about control and making sure they can continue to rob the artists. Hell artists got a bigger cut in the 1950s as a percentage than now, and thanks to "forever minus a single day" copyrights they can continue to rob the artist even after they are dead. But now they are scared, the combo of digital recording and the tubes mean new artists can just sign profit sharing deals with promotion companies and bypass the system, and thanks to digital they can't keep selling you the White Album like they did with album to 8 track to cassette to CD, this frightens them. Good DIAF you back stabbing leeches.

Infringing copyright isn't theft. Copyright theft is when a record company takes the rights to their musicians' work. If I held a gun to your head and made you sign your copyrights over, that too would be copyright theft.

The publishing industries should stop listening to the advertiser's mantra "sell the sizzle, not the steak" and try to understand what the phrase means. You can't sell me a sizzle, but the sizzle might help you sell me a steak.

What's the difference between downloading a CD's worth of songs and checking the CD out from the library? It has dozens of movies, hundreds of CDs and thousands of books -- all free.

Since the invention of moveable type, the content sold the book. The music sold the record. Plays, concerts, and movies were the only exceptions. Study after study shows that music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates. Attack piracy and you attack your best customers. I can think of little more foolish.

However, I agree that those making money from piracy or counterfeiting are in fact stealing. In that case, something is indeed lost.

You may not be aware of this, but when a person donates a book, he no longer has the book!

There is only one copy of the book. The internet is the computer, the local disk is only a cache for optimisation purpose. The same way that all your so called 'legit' files have copy all over the disk, ram and cpu. Essentially, the book is multiplexed and no user are accessing the same byte at the same time (not guaranteed but simultaneous access is very unlikely).

Why users sharing a computer system should not be able to access the same data? Why peoples in the same room should not share a book?

Yeah, computer allow to do amazing things that are not possible with paper. It's called progress, and you can't do shit about it.

How is this fair? You're basically arguing that because the publishers don't compensate authors enough, the taxpayer should do it (via libraries) instead?
If we're going to put authors on welfare, then let's do it properly. Have the government pay them a living wage, and let's cut out the publishers altogether. And let's stop with all that prohibited copying nonsense.